Everywhere I have to decode messages like a scavenger. I am slowly learning to carve a thin line into the ground as a record of my existence.

After hours walking through the desert I found a small city. Tall buildings surrounded every corner. The inhabitants wore thick rope around their wrists, a single red dot marked the middle of their back. They kept their eyes averted, turned to the ground. But one man quickly looked at me, his eyes were broken glass, eyelids burned from the desert sun. I asked him how long he had lived here. He nodded his head when he walked past me, the ropes on his wrist so tight the skin bulged out.

from EXPEDITION NOTES

[Every Field Contains a Frozen Bird]

Today an ice-field of yellow ribbons strung together by invisible thread. Where are the scientists that charted this land? Miniature bright flags flap and I close my eyes to see the sky fill with every songbird I’ll never see again. My backyard filled with green flashes of hummingbirds, a sharp streak of cardinal. Will I forget the redness of a ladybug? The miniature pattern of black dots, how they used to land on my hand? Sometimes I see phantoms, strands of smoke or breath or sprays of white flowers. I can stand for hours in front of fallen rocks. I am grateful for the wolf who has followed me for months.

Carrie Bennett is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow and author of biography of water, The Land Is a Painted Thing, and several chapbooks from dancing girl press: The Quiet Winter, Animals in Pretty Cages, and The Affair Fragments. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, jubilat among others. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently teaches writing at Boston University.